Creates a local backup of your Gmail account.
Lightweight, silent and reliable.

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We are very glad to release the most requested feature from our community: the Snapshots of the Gmail labels.

We followed your suggestions and requests about BackUp Gmail. Many users asked for a feature to create instantly a backup of a Gmail labels. Many users need to remove old emails from the Gmail server but keeping them in a local copy. Some other prefer to create a secure local copy every year just to keep trace of them. So we worked a lot, putting all together and we can say that all you need is the new Snapshots feature!

You can find it in the Utility window, have a look:

As you can see the window shows to you the complete list of your Gmail labels. We keep them stored in the DB (by the backup procedure) so BackUp Gmail can clone them locally. You can select them recursively following the path (in Gmail you can create nested folder). Then click on the Snapshot button and you will find the snapshot of the selected folder (with the nested children, if they exist) in your backup folder:

It creates a new subfolder label_date-time inside the new Snapshots main folder, so you can keep more snapshots in the same folder. The procedure works locally (it is faster) so if you want a really snapshot of a Gmail label do not forget to create a backup before starting!

Update procedure on the new version 1.9

When you will open the new version for the first time it needs to update your database. Please, let it finish. This update move your “old” backup in new folders (in the Filestore) that use the complete email address (in the previous versions we called them just with the user, removing all after the @).

After investigating on a very strange behavior of our App we found a solution to a very common problem comes from Avast!: This antivirus blocks every connection to the Gmail server over imaps (port 993).

Every users that use Avast! has to add an exception in their “Email protection” system.

Open the Avast Preferences and click on Advanced for the Email protection:

Then click on Exception and add your Exception clicking on the little plus (+):

You have to add an exception for:

Server: imap.gmail.com
Service: imaps

Now our App can freely communicate to the Gmail server.

Other antivirus (check the Error in the logs)

At the moment we don’t know but maybe you could have the same error with others antivirus. You can see the strange behavior of our App in the logs (after enabling the logs in the Preferences):

Enable the “Debug mode logging” for the verbose version of the logs. For the most verbose level of the logs you have to enable the IMAP transactions logs but be careful: it can quickly fill your memory (it creates a lot of data).

To See the standard Logs

Open the Utility -> Logs window, they will browse in that window:

Before closing it remember to disable the Logs in Preferences otherwise it will go ahead to store data in that box.

To See the Console Errors

Sometimes an App can crash and we need to understand what happened before helping you. You should see the logs in the OSX Console, copy it and send them to us.

Open it (Application -> Utility -> Console) and look for the BackUp Gmail lines:

Our App, as many people ask us, has to be stable, very stable. The people wants to forget it, like every backup procedure. And we wish to provide this service.
At the same time, Gmail improves often the functionalities of his service and we have to keep our App up-to-date constantly.

Many people ask to me for an Advanced Search. We planned in our milestone to develop a simple Viewer that will allow you to search for any field (Sender, Subject, Date, etc).

But today I would like to give you an alternative until we will release this new feature.
As you know Mac OS X is built on UNIX/BSD and the powerful of this OS can help you. Most of the commands are by command line but do not worry, it’s easy!

Open the Terminal: Applications -> Utility -> Terminal (or look for it in the new Launchpad). When you sill see the prompt command line you will be ready!

First, you need to move into your Backup folder (selected in the Preferences of Backup Gmail). Use the ‘cd’ command:

cd ~/Documents/Backups/Gmail

Now you can use the powerful ‘grep‘, send this command:

egrep -i -l -R "Osaka" Filestore/jazzo72/2008

It will look for all the emails contains the word “Osaka” in the year 2008. It will check recursively in all the nested folders starting from Filestore/jazzo72/2008. To understand better this path read the post about the FileStore sub-folders structure. The output will give you the relative path to the filename of the email(s) that includes that word:

jazzo72/2008/03/20080321-074810_lastphoto.eml

Now you can get this email following the path or you can directly open it by this command:

open jazzo72/2008/03/20080321-074810_lastphoto.eml

The “open” command will open the email with your Mail client software.

We improved the stability of BackUp Gmail with a new notification system that checks if the “Internet connection” is available and the Gmail server is ready. So we have could add the new “Cancel backup” to stop it when it is in progress.
We worked finally to create an enhanced log system to help users that have a problem using the App. Now, in a very low level, it can log even the “IMAP traffic“.